RésonanceMusical Heritage of La Francophonie

Canadian Museum of Civilization

Truly it is the cockroach of creative expression and communication—persevering and pervasive. It's like some inner exoskeleton encasing our souls. Even the iconoclast and philosopher Frederich Nietzsche declares that without it, "life would be a mistake."

It is "...the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible," writes renowned anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, "And untranslatable."

What is it? It is music.

Résonance mediates music's qualities onto its own skin in ways rarely orchestrated so beautifully in museum exhibitions. Mounted in conjunction with the Games of La Francophonie 2001 that begin this weekend, the exhibit features over one hundred instruments, video footage, hundreds of sound clips, interviews, photographs, a computer with the companion web site as well as explanatory panels. Out of the many people contributing to the exhibit, curator Dr. Carmelle Bègin deserves a particular "Bravo!".

For Dr. Bègin, a former student of ethnomusicology in Paris and in Montreal, choosing what to include cannot have been easy. Instead of a dried out, abstract and narrowly defined exhibition, Bègin has ensured that viewers will hear the beating of many different drums. Résonance features people and their music truly from all over the world—not just the usual version of "we are the world," North America and a bit of Western Europe.

Doubtless there are oversights, but to one who knows little of the field, they seem few and far between. In addition to France itself and the obvious—Quebec, Mali, New Brunswick, the Seychelles, Senegal, and Haiti for instance—little known places are represented here. Rèunion a small island in the Indian Ocean, for example, is home to the tapon, a drum used as a mediator.

As much as possible the instruments, the musicians and the music itself are not decontextualized. Despite largely being Godless and immersed in the Top 40 and MTV projection(s) of music and its role, at a visceral level we North Americans hopefully still have some connection to music's potent symbolic and cultural power in day-to-day life. Here you can have some insight into the lives of people for whom music continues to be just that—a daily, often sacred practice, the breath of the soul as opposed to something bought and (passively?) consumed.

It is enlightening.

Résonance glances behind the instrument and within the music and its makers to present something of the traditions behind it. As well as textual panels, this is done through several video terminals running looped video clips of subjects like fiddling competitions, Techno DJing, to rituals where music plays the lead role.

Designers Frèdèric St-Laurent and Michel Paquette have done a tremendous job creating a space that like music itself demolishes barriers. With a range of woody shades, from pale almond through to dark orange, brown and black, serving as a backdrop and for paneling, the designers use glass cases and plexi-glass to create a space with very few visual barriers. At almost any part of the exhibit, all other parts (and people) are visible. Furthermore, these colours are the very same as those of the materials used to make the instruments themselves. (I felt quite literally as if I was inside an musical instrument trying to understand how it worked and what kind of sound it made.)

The origins of "La Francophonie" is French colonialism, of which ironically little or no mention is made here. Lit panels in the floor demarcate the parallels between music and sport referencing spirituality, performance, technique and practice amongst other things. A wall of musical instruments from around the world (including the anglophone world) strides across one end of the exhibition—put in alphabetical order according to their French names.

One instrument, for me, paradoxically encapsulates some of the tensions, failures, ironies and silences of French colonialism and the "RA RA" somewhat guilt-ridden attitude towards "La Francophonie" in North America. Its essence—a turquoise coloured New Brunswick hareng tin—is still evident. Washed up onto the shores of Burkina Faso, the tin originally contained herring in soya oil. With the addition of a bit of wood and some metal prongs, it is transformed into a musical instrument, a sanza.